For all the railing against dysfunction in the nation’s capital, very little had actually
happened to overcome it — until this week. That’s why the agreement to begin putting an end to
Senate filibusters of presidential nominees is a very big deal. It is an acknowledgement that the
only way to stop political bullying is to confront the bully.

On its face, the accord allowing seven of President Barack Obama’s executive-branch nominees to
gain confirmation without having to reach 60 votes would seem to be a climb-down by Democrats. They
shelved plans to change the Senate rules and bar filibusters of the president’s appointments to
agency and cabinet jobs.

But this understates the magnitude of the victory. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell
would have let the nominees through only if the Democrats promised not to alter the rules for the
rest of this Congress. Yet such a capitulation would have opened the way for future
filibusters.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stoutly refused to sheath the sword of a subsequent rules
battle. The nominees went through on the basis of a modest concession. President Obama agreed to
withdraw two recess appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, Richard Griffin and Sharon
Block, in exchange for confirmation of two new nominees who would be equally sympathetic to the
rights of workers.

Defenders of the filibuster have let loose torrents of empty words about preserving the “
traditions” of the Senate and maintaining it as the “cooling saucer” (an observation attributed to
George Washington) that would temper the passions of the House. What has been happening has nothing
to do with tradition or deliberation. Rather, the Republican right has radically restructured the
Senate by sharply escalating uses of the filibuster, which is not, in any event, in the
Constitution. This has been a power struggle, pure and simple.

Of course, Democrats have used the filibuster in the past. What’s important here — and it’s the
reason this confrontation was necessary — is that the Senate GOP has gone far beyond its “normal”
uses.

There is, first, the evidence of numbers. As Jonathan Cohn pointed out in
The New Republic, filibusters of presidential agency nominations were once very rare,
happening only two times each to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton had nine nominations
blocked, and George W. Bush had seven. Obama is “already up to 16 blocks,” Cohn noted.

Rationalizations for filibusters, moreover, have reached into anti-constitutional territory.
Republicans were preventing the confirmation of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau not because there were problems with him but because they were still
mad that the agency, which expands consumer power over financial institutions, had been created in
the first place.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who partnered with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to push through this
deal, was admirably candid. “Cordray was being filibustered because we don’t like the law,” Graham
said. “That’s not a reason to deny someone their appointment. We were wrong.”

In the end, Cordray was confirmed with 66 votes, and this was not just a procedural triumph. It
was genuine shift in the balance in Washington toward consumers and away from banking
interests.

Despite the persistent snarling of Senate business, Democrats might not have found the courage
to carry this fight but for the work of Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Tom
Udall of New Mexico, three Democrats who started pushing their reluctant colleagues in 2011 to
challenge the filibuster. The threesome’s work, in turn, unleashed a larger movement among
rank-and-file progressives who understood, as Merkley put it in an interview, that the “cooling
saucer” had become a deep freeze, and that obstruction ultimately was the enemy of progressive uses
of government.

The approach, he insisted, is especially congenial to the new Republican right. “If you’re
putting forth an argument that ‘government is the enemy,’ it’s easier to say, ‘let’s prevent it
from working.'"

This round represents a major advance for those who want government to do its job. But it will
take continuing pressure to keep the obstructionists at bay.